We have always have had the urge to travel, but the early years of our relationship, we didn’t have the means to do the type of airplane travel that we do now. We still had curiosity about nature, people, and the world so we just pursued it a different way. So, we did a lot of weekend road trips. Car camping, backpacking, and a lot of cheap hotels. We had been to every county in Washington state by the time we were 30 years old. We saw a lot of state parks, a lot of islands, a lot of waterfalls, many mountain lake hikes, a lot of small town museums and minor tourist attractions. We would take 3-4 day weekends and explored a lot of British Columbia and Oregon. It got warmer in Eastern Washington earlier than the Western Washington so we often started camping or road tripping in March or April and we got to know the other side of the mountains pretty well. We kept road tripping when we had kids and continued to see the lesser known parts of the Pacific Northwest. It got to the point that we felt like we had seen the coolest stuff. We were ready to see more of the rest of the world and we started focusing our vacations by starting with an airplane.
But maybe a good old fashioned road trip is still fun. And maybe we haven’t been everywhere. We are in the Northwest for the summer and decided to get the camping stuff out of storage and get back out there.
We started by heading towards Mt. Hood in Oregon. We had been near there quite a bit but it seems like we only went near the old Timberline lodge when it was cloudy and rainy. Not so this week. We found a great place to camp on Trillium lake that gave us a lot of frameable photos.
After a couple of nights camping, we were ready to move on. We haven’t explored central/eastern Oregon much so we headed in that direction to see what we could find. Lots of beautiful views while driving. One of our first stops was a bungee jumping bridge near Terrebonne, Oregon. Fun to watch but we weren’t in the mood for jumping.
We continued on to see the John Day Fossil Beds. We were interested in seeing the Painted Hills that somehow we had missed on all our other Oregon trips. Another impressive site that for some great photos.
We ended up staying in a motel in the town of John Day. We ate in one of the 4 restaurants in town and talked to the Texas bartender who owned 2 of the restaurants while we waited for our food. We like visiting small towns but this reinforces our desires to never live in one. The next morning we checked out their small but very interesting historical site which gave us an hour tour. It was an old store and doctors office from the Chinese Community that lived their during the town’s mining days. Really interesting and unexpected find.
We continued to drive through some of mountainous terrain of Eastern Oregon. I tend to think of Eastern Oregon as just an extension of the flat plateau of Eastern Washington. Nope, we kept going up 4000 foot mountain passes and then down scenic river valleys. We ended up heading back to our Washington Wine Country that we know really well. We found some good wine tasting and then a cheap hotel on the Yakima river with a bike trail next to it. The next morning, we took a bike ride and then headed back over the mountains.
On the way home, we take our preferred pass – Chinook Pass rather than the boring Snoqualmie Pass. We have done this route many times but we still like to stop and take pictures of Tipsoo lake and Mount Rainier. I have many, many pics of this from years past but it was such a clear day, we had to do it again.
Great trip and we are excited to do some more road trip adventures this summer. What is interesting to us is that we started doing road trips because we were young and didn’t have much money. Now, we are retired and are on a budget again. Gas is expensive and inflation has really hit restaurants and hotels in the US. This road trip was actually more expensive per day than our recent trips to Southern Europe and Southeast Asia. It is funny that now that we are retired, it can be cheaper to do international travel than our old standard of Washington State road trips. But camping and backpacking are still cheap and we plan to do a lot more of that before we head back to Europe this fall.